1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the customization of information. More particularly, the present invention relates to the distribution of customized multimedia content over a network.
2. Related Applications
U.S. patent application having Ser. No. 08/818,804, entitled xe2x80x9cProduction of a Video Stream with Synchronized Annotations over a Computer Networkxe2x80x9d (""804 application), is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. The ""804 application issued as U.S. Pat. No. 6,006,241 on Dec. 21, 1999.
3. Description of the Related Art
With the proliferation of connections to the internet by a rapidly growing number of consumers, the viability of the internet as a widely accepted marketing channel using multimedia content has increased correspondingly. However, in a substantially dispersed marketplace, sending the same marketing content to all the consumers within the marketplace is not cost effective.
This is because consumers within the substantially dispersed marketplace may have diverse interests since their needs can vary greatly. Using a sporting goods example, a busy executive may only be interested in stationary exercise machines, while a retired engineer may be interested in rifles and camping equipment. Consumer needs also vary greatly depending on geographical location. Swimsuits are probably more popular in San Diego than in Anchorage. Conversely, snow mobiles are probably sell better in Alaska than in Arizona.
As such, efficient distribution of marketing information is needed to avoid wasting network resources. However, traditional methods of marketing generally involve mass marketing information to the consumers within the marketplace. This mass marketing model is unsatisfactory for large marketplaces wherein the consumers are more likely to have diverse interest.
In view of the foregoing, there are desired improved techniques for efficiently distributing marketing information over a computer network to consumers with diverse interest, while efficiently utilizing the network resources thereby providing consumers with information that is of interest to the individual consumer in a cost effective manner.
The present invention provides cost effective personalized multimedia content targeted at specific end users or groups of end users via client computers coupled to local servers by a diverse computer network which includes local area networks (LANs) and/or wide area networks (WANs) such as the internet. Multimedia content includes video/audio streams and textual and/or graphical information such as applets and HTML pages.
In one embodiment, a global server provides global content via a computer network to a local server. The local server retrieves personal profile associated with the targeted end user(s) from a local database. Personalized content is generated based on the personal profile. Customized information which includes both the global and personalized content is then delivered to the targeted end user(s) via client computer(s) coupled to the computer network. Global and personalized content may or may not be related. For example, global content may be an action movie while unrelated personalized content may be an advertisement for a custom suit in the color, style and size likely to please the targeted end user.